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Before you stopped talking, you told me you were nervous about what might happen to you in the days or hours leading up to the end. It was the only time the two of us talked about your impending death without dancing around the pale, cold particulars of it.  “I want you to promise to remember me this way,” you told me, sitting up in bed. “Not in my pajamas obviously, but I want you to remember me how I am right now and not what I might be like in a few weeks or whenever this supposedly all goes downhill, ok?” You carefully smoothed the blanket across your lap, the once red polish on your fingernails faded to pink. “Ok,” I said, trying to understand the cruelty of life that it makes people have to warn loved ones that they might become unrecognizable to them. “Maybe we can have a code or something?” you asked. Your voice was still light then, almost playful. “What do you mean a code?” “A way for you to know if I’ve still got a light on upstairs.” “Very funny. Ok, what’s the code?” You thought for a moment, tilting your head slightly to the left the way you always did when you were searching for the right word. The light from the window catching the icy gray of your chin-length bob.   “I’ve got it,” you said. “Nevertheless, she persisted.” “Where’s that from?” I asked. “It’s the motto for the Sausalito Women’s Club.” “Of course, it is.” “The minute I forget the code you can start remembering the way I was up until that very moment. Deal?” “Deal.” This was our little inside joke over the next few weeks. Every once in a while, I would catch you in the middle of breakfast or watching the nightly news and say “Nevertheless?” and you would smile and answer back, “She persisted.” It seemed impossible back then. That someone like you could one day no longer exist on this planet. You were a mythical creature that could not die. Tuesdays. Major League baseball. The southern migration of sandhill cranes. How could they go on as if nothing had happened?  But then the smiles became few and far between. The news was rarely on. You were in bed one morning when the hospice nurse told me to get you up for an early lunch. I went to your room where I found you lying on your side, the covers tucked around you like armor. I touched your shoulder. The fabric of your nightgown was soft and worn thin. “Nevertheless,” I said. But instead of answering, you let out a low moan, your eyes shut tight to some private agony. I said it again in case you hadn’t heard, but you just lay there in silence.  That was the moment I stopped remembering you.  Trevor J. Houser works in advertising and lives with his family in Seattle. He published his first two novels, PACIFIC (2021) and THE PRUMONT METHOD (2023) with Unsolicited Press. His third novel comes out in 2026. He has been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize and has had stories published in dozens of literary journals, including Zyzzyva, StoryQuarterly  and  CutBank .

Notes for a Community College Commencement Speech From a certain perspective everything looks like math but if you pay attention to the subtext it says to work on being charming and go into sales. Not cut out for sales I got a job redirecting people’s negative thoughts. I think the mind is sometimes a vaulted ceiling and sometimes a shallow pit. Everyone wants to be both a child and a great Oak tree. My father wanted me to be a simple country doctor; my mother, a tech giant. Everyone wants a billion dollars. In my line of work what seems to work is sharing mildly interesting anecdotes or asking personal but superficial questions. Bach had 13 kids and none of them played the piano. Jack-o'-lanterns used to be carved from turnips. What’s your favorite kind of mail to get? What’s the hardest part of the day for you? That’s when you should make a snack. You can try and try but you will never be happier than when you’re eating a snack. If your dog is there with you then that’s better. If you give your dog a little bite that, too, is even better. You can try and try but that’s the best you can do. But keep trying because you never know.  What’s Happening in the World of Sports Today Is That the World’s Top Tennis Players are Beating Each Other Over the Head With Their Rackets Because of an Out-of-Bounds Call One guy says it’s good and the other guy says it’s shit. I don’t argue on the internet anymore. I might not even believe in the internet anymore. How do I know if I exist? I’m sitting outside in a lawn chair, that’s how. Entrepreneurs invent something new every two hours. They don’t think it’s funny but everyone else does. I watch the news once a day, and what I miss, I miss. I’m studying a picture of our daughter standing on a drawbridge at night in the summer. She’s looking out at the water. She seems content and beautiful but minutes before it was taken she was crying. The picture invents an ache that lives inside me. It’s my favorite possession. I think every door is saying open a door and walk through but I think every bridge is saying you could be happy either way. I suppose the ability to take a punch is something you’re born with. Either you have it or you do not. No, wait. That’s wrong. Taking a punch is not something you are born with. Taking a punch is something you will need to learn. Everyone Come Back We never decided which color to paint the bathroom. If you want sky blue, raise your hand. If you think eggshell, take a step forward. If you want wallpaper I guess take a step back. The average person spends seven minutes and 19 seconds in the bathroom every day. Not counting extraordinary circumstances. In a public restroom people cut that time in half. If I had to choose I’d say California is the most dream-like state. Second is Kansas, of course. Having decided is probably the saddest thing you can do. All those lives shriveling to nothing behind you. The color no one wanted. The jobs you never trained for. You could have been a good surgeon or a bad surgeon. I never punched a guy I wanted to punch and I told myself I was better for it. The world was better for it. A violence that surely would have borne more violence was instead kept on a leash. Kept in my jacket pocket. We have fists but we also have hands. It’s always 50-50.  Not that Kind of Funeral I once donated five boxes of books to the library. The next day I couldn’t find the novel I’d been reading. The main character was about to take dramatic action. I went back to the library and found my book shelved under new arrivals. I brought it home and started from the first page like we were strangers. Turns out the hero fails every challenge. In the end she is worse off in most ways. Does not untangle the web of clues to her past. Does not find love. Someone steals her car and her mother dies unexpectedly. At the very end she is faced with a decision. I’ve been asking myself my whole life what’s worthwhile, what adds and what diminishes. I taste my own blood and wonder if that’s God. I wash the dishes and wonder if that’s God. The soft belly of my dog, is that God? When a Prince song comes on and I remember after having forgotten how beautiful his voice was, is that God? They’re interviewing a basketball player on the news who wins every game at the buzzer. He says he’s no hero. He thanks Jesus and his mother and his teammates. They show a clip. Time is running out. He is most alive as everything comes to an end.   It’s Hard to Tell If You’re Doing It Right I let my dog chase rabbits. I do it because it makes him happy. I think it reminds him of a distant past. A code in his mind. A true self. The rabbits are safe. I make sure. Though they must be frightened, I imagine. I try to do right in life. I care for helpless things. Delicate things. I would care for a wounded rabbit if I saw one. After chasing a rabbit my dog and I keep walking. Both of us scan the grass along the row of thick rose bushes. This Goddamn world. Everything is hungry. All the flowers and all the animals. The Sun and whatever will destroy the Sun. I’m wrong more than I’m right. That’s something I admit. There’s something I want that’s hiding in a small space I cannot reach. My breath is hot and smelling like iron. The D Poem Our daughter asks for help writing a poem for school. We tell her all the rules they gave her are wrong. Her poem gets a D. People say there’s a lot wrong with the D poem. But the D poem doesn’t pay attention to any of that. It gets up every day and faces the world. I’m a D, it says to itself. I’m a D poem. Not an easy thing to do in a world that believes mostly in As. A world that might lower itself to admire a B, maybe. Someone tells the D poem that it would have been an E poem except they don’t give out Es in poetry. In an infinite universe there’s no way to know if that’s true, we say. We tell the D poem it’s doing great. We love you, we say. On its birthday our daughter sends messages to the D poem. She says things like, “D is for dare, D is for dream!” She says, “D for donuts and Daytona Beach!” The D poem is in love with the world and it doesn’t matter if the world loves the D poem back. “D is for desire and demand to live in the sun!,” she writes. Nothing can stop the D poem now.  Jeffrey Hermann's work has appeared in Okay Donkey, Passages North, Heavy Feather, Wigleaf, and other publications. His first full-length collection of prose poetry and flash fiction will be published by ELJ Editions in 2026. Though less publicized, he finds his work as a father and husband to be rewarding beyond measure.

We are waiting for our flight.  We are a group of four (the Beatles but worse): Alan, Susie, Paul, me. We are playing eye-spy and two-truths-one-lie and all manner of exciting games. We are attempting handstands.  We are still waiting for our flight. We are researching the history and etymology of goldfish on Wikipedia.  We are eating all our food, a royal buffet of sandwiches and apples and salted almonds. We are talking to an old lady—she is going to Malta to spread her husband’s ashes. We are nodding seriously.  We are informed by a self-serious Italian man about his scruples with the corrupt Italian government. We are nodding in confusion.  We are analysed by an American. We are lectured by an Argentinian. We are quickly running out of fun anecdotes to tell each other.  We are called suddenly to Gate 5, but once there we are told by airport staff to go away. We are seriously and diplomatically discussing our options as if we have any at all.  We are watching the sun set on the sticky smoking balcony. We are more than slightly tired of waiting. We are planning on sleeping in shifts.  We are called again to Gate 5, but this time there is nobody there. *** There is no flight, says Alan, who hasn’t slept in at least thirty hours. There is no flight. There is no holiday. There is no plane. There is no hope. There are only duty-free shops and overpriced cafés and fast-food restaurants and all of them have kicked us out because we didn’t buy anything. There is no reason to get hysterical, I tell Alan.  There is no God, Alan continues. There is no afterlife. There is no reason for anything. There is no meaning and there is no time. There is nothing. There is nothing.  *** Alan falls asleep, finally. Susie wakes up and checks the live departures board and starts crying.  Phil wakes up and does some push-ups. I count the number of windows on the upper floor (it’s ninety-three).  Paul does jumping jacks. Susie falls asleep again. Alan wakes up. I am falling asleep. Paul is doing chin-ups. Alan falls asleep again. I begin talking to a wall to stay awake.  Paul does Tai Chi until the airport staff ask him to stop.  I fall asleep. *** Then I wake up.  Then I eat my second-to-last packet of salted almonds. Then I tell Paul I’m down to my last fucking packet of salted almonds. Then Paul says he finished his food two hours ago so I can join the club.  Then Susie starts physically attacking Alan, all punches and flying kicks and everything, and the rest of us just watch in shock. Then she stops and apologises, says that she doesn’t know what came over her.  Then we are called to Gate 5 again. Then, then, then—the plane is actually here .  Then we are actually boarding the flight, and I can’t believe this is happening, and Susie says this is the happiest she’s been in her entire life.  Then we are waiting for two hours at a standstill on the runway. Then we are told to get off the plane. Then we go back into customs.  Then Alan vomits on the floor. Then the flight is cancelled. Daniel Birch is a writer of fiction and nonfiction from the UK. He currently lives on the Cornish coast, where he studies English & Creative Writing at Falmouth University. More of his work can be found on his blog, https://contagiouswordsblog.wordpress.com

The Breakup I leave this with you— a few lines, hastily scratched on a page gone limp with the perspiration of sorrow. The paper retains, I believe, the faint chill of my grief, and my grief—what else?—bears the stale imprint of your desire. Bravo. You’ve always had a talent for undoing. The Destroyer: yes, that name will do. I bequeath it to you without malice. Do not search for me. I shall be elsewhere, in some God-forgotten hamlet the mapmakers have mercifully missed,  living in quiet congress with my own lamentations. Your love, as it turns out, was counterfeit— and now, at last, the world concurs. Verses about me—I hope—in her Snoopy diary So here’s the deal:  He’s basically a Neanderthal. Stone jaw. Big mitts. Cro-Magnon vibes all the way down.  But God help me, he delights me. He speaks fluent bear.  Not like “roar roar” bear—real bear. Actual ursine communication.  He whispers into the wind and animals answer back. Owls. Foxes. Once, a bison. No kidding. When he walks through a field, it’s not romantic.  Every flower gets crushed.  Every petal screams silently. It’s kind of beautiful. Kind of tragic. Like most things. His masculinity goes before him like a warning flare. Like: Caution. Primitive force approaching. He breaks things. He bites.  He’s bitten me, and—surprise!—sometimes I like it.  There. I said it. Cancel me. He might not be entirely human.  Might be 60% animal.  Might be 40% sadness.  Might be 100% wrecking ball. But our love-making? Earth-shattering. Literally. Once, a shelf fell down. Maybe that’s the only thread tying me to him. And if that makes me shallow—then I guess I float. The Map of Your Treasure There’s a trail I walk when the night presses in close, when the air thickens with want. It begins at your brow, salted with sweat, like the Gulf air in August, runs the line of your neck where the skin grows soft and shadowed, moves past the place your breath stutters to the dip of your belly, until I reach the ocean of you. And when I do, your toes curl like leaves in heat, your breath a rush of wind through pine and field. You make a sound— not quite word, not quite cry— and the sky splits open like a wound, galaxies pouring from the seam. In that moment, time forgets itself. The world rights its wrongs, and life— wild, beautiful, trembling— begins again. Albert Rodríguez  is an emerging writer based in Brooklyn, New York. A graduate of Borough of Manhattan Community College, his fiction has appeared in  Five on the Fifth, Litro Magazine, White Wall Review, Platform Review, Across the Margin, Modern Literature, Ink Pantry, Literally Stories, Active Muse, The Rye Whiskey Review, The Fictional Café, Yellow Mama, and The Piker Press , among other periodicals.

1 . Costa had broken his leg. No sooner had he received his diagnosis than a stream of messages came flowing forth in the group chat, beweeping his state and putting in requests for alcohol, food, dexamphetamines, and other miscellania. He was going to be laid up at his mum’s house for at least six weeks, which obviously didn’t suit his lifestyle. For all that he had served our community, he was calling on us now to be with him in his time of need. Lachie and I were the closest to Costa. So it was incumbent on us to support him (more so than the others, who mostly just endured his dominion). Everyone liked him, but the cold hard fact was that liking him was forbearance. Lachie and I seemed to just have that subservient nature, like a Versailles footman or death row executioner. Simply put, when compared to everyone else, we’d spent more cumulative hours listening to him rant at four-thirty in the morning about democratic principles in contention with plutomania or whatever thesis happened to have sprung out of the last YouTube documentary he’d watched. The rest of them had better things to do. 2. We sat at Costa’s bedside, as though he had cancer or AIDS or something. His hairy toes were poking out of the end of his cast, pointing toward me with what felt like accusation. For someone who had always seemed so gargantuan, who shrouded a room just by entering it, he was small there in his childhood bed, bereft, like a shrunken head. It was somehow touching that this man, who could send quivers of seismic shock through a party at his merest whim, was so contained. He was midway through berating Lachie for having brought up his ex-girlfriend, even though it might have been him who had done so. In a brief aperture of his raving, he leant across to his bedside table to clutch at one of the cherry-and-pomegranate vapes we’d bought him (Lachie and I had argued about how many to bring - I was fast being proven correct that seven wouldn’t last a week). I took advantage of the breath to probe Costa about his accident. ‘I was playing netball and I tripped, that’s all that happened, it was innocuous , totally innocuous, but what happened was that I was going down and my foot didn’t go any further so my entire weight came down on it. Crushed the bones to dust, just a freak accident they said, so now I’m holed up like a fuckin… invalid .’ ‘Why, though? It’s not the eighteen-sixties.’ He puffed. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’ ‘Why don’t you use crutches?’ ‘Fuck crutches.’ ‘Or a wheelchair.’ ‘I’m not using a wheelchair, Dylan.’ ‘Sorry I asked.’ There was a certain joy he was taking in his misery. He couldn’t bear the thought of six weeks with only his mum to talk to, with nothing to do but play his online chess games and watch the news feed of the upcoming presidential election. I didn’t feel that this prospect sounded vastly different from his routine, except for the one obvious major alteration; he couldn’t party. ‘I miss you all so goddamned much. I know it’s only been two days but it feels much longer because of the anaesthetic. And Mandy’s thirty-first is on Saturday. I was looking forward to it, even though she can go to hell for what she said about me. But I already paid for my drugs, so I’ll guess I’ll just be sitting here off my face on ket trying to keep myself from going in a hole - unless you guys want to come out here at like…twelve? We’d  just be doing what we’re doing now, or unless you want to bring a couple of the girls, they could see my cast and bring a few drinks, you know, that could be good…probably don’t bring Lucy though, or Adam, they’re a bit -‘ In the depths of his soliloquies, he had a way of self-perpetuating. As much as we were unable to interrupt or contribute, so too did it seem as though he were unable to stop. There had been moments in the dead of an early-morning high when I could see a panic flashing in his eyes like a far-off supernova in the depths of a forgotten galaxy. I got to feeling like that flash of panic was a communique from the innermost being of Costa, the truest Costa, that was desperate to be recognised. That true Costa, like a castaway or a media company, was reduced to a crude, semaphoric state in which communication was both the end and the means, and purely one-sided. I would watch him suck in giant gulps of oxygen to fuel his logorrhea. As though he were sucking in all the air in the room. All the air from us who watched and laughed for his near-perfect performance. This character who veered larger than reality. This engine of the social. ‘ - I’ll need more booze though, if you don’t mind doing another delivery, which is all right because then we can hang out a bit more- ‘ ‘Why will you need more booze? We’ve brought a whole case, plus the gin and the rum.’ ‘And the wine,’ Lachie said. ‘I’ll pay you back, it’s just that mum won’t get me anything, ‘cause of what the doctor said - ‘ ‘What’d the doctor say, Costa?’ ‘Some medical  bullshit, you know, they think we haven’t read up on these things, they’re talking out of their arse about stuff that appeared in a medical textbook forty-five years ago and got outdated forty-four-and-a-half years ago - ‘ ‘Yeah, so what’d he say?’ ‘He said I’m not ‘supposed’ to mix alcohol with the pain meds.’ ‘So why did you ask us to bring you alcohol?’ ‘I’m not going to go six weeks without a drink, dude. I went two days already and I was starting to shake like a bitch, and anyway Lachie didn’t mind - ‘ ‘You knew he’s not allowed to drink?’ ‘Yeah,’ Lachie shrugged. ‘Why did we get him alcohol then?’ ‘It’s his choice,’ he said. I turned back to Costa, who had slopped some dark red wine into the mug from which he’d been guzzling. ‘Maybe you shouldn’t  drink for six weeks.’ ‘I don’t want to be sober for that long.’ ‘That’s kind of my point.’ ‘Anyway, it takes the edge off the dexy’s, and I need the dexy’s for my ADHD, but it’s fucking lame when I have no one to talk to. So it’s good to take the edge off.’ ‘So you drink when there’s no one around. And also when there’s someone around.’ ‘When someone’s around, a bit of booze makes the conversation better. Jesus, Dylan, since when did you become a nun? Fucking rule-boy here.’ ‘I just don’t really understand why you wouldn’t listen to a doctor.’ ‘Doctors tell us to stop vaping, but you puff away on that little robot dick until you go crosseyed. And you’re one to bitch about booze; how many times have I carried you on my - literally on my back - to get to the Uber? And when exactly was the last time you paid me back for the coke I shout you? And the ket? And the MD? And the weed? I don’t even like weed, dude, and there I am spending my money on it so that you’ll stop being a killjoy all the time. God damn, excuse me if I’m not running a half-marathon every Tuesday. I have other interests. Shame on me for liking to hang out with people and for getting a good feeling from the people around me. I don’t have to stock everyone with wine from Auntie Grace’s vineyard, but I do it because I know that what’s good for one person is good for everyone. That’s what a community is, and that’s why we need to take care of one another. And you also, let’s not forget, wrecked my favourite - ‘ I’d set him off. To avoid doing so was one of mine and Lachie’s sacred rules. I was punished enough by Lachie’s glare to shut up then. We sat there for another few hours, never really being forgiven by Costa for our terrible sin of coming to see him. 3. I grabbed Lachie by the arm later that night, when we were briefly left alone in the courtyard of the Bowlo. The girls had gone to take a bump in the bathroom. I asked Lachie what the hell was his problem, and why he hadn’t spoken up in my support today at Costa’s. It wasn’t that I needed him to agree with everything I said, but I truly felt I was going crazy if no one else agreed that we had at least some degree of responsibility, as his friends, to help him. Not to coddle him like an infant, though he acted like it sometimes, but to make sure he was healthy when he couldn’t. At least, I thought, we could do that. At least, I thought, we could try. Lachie told me that I was being overdramatic, a nanna, trying to control people and how they responded to the world. He said I was like the state government, which had over the past decade slowly choked the nightlife out of Sydney, a city we’d once loved. I told him that I was different, because my intentions were altruistic and I wasn’t a corrupt bastard wrist-deep in a casino magnate. Lachie said that altruism isn’t about telling people what to do. Or what not to do. ‘But he’ll fucking die or something one day, mate. It’s not cute anymore. We’re not getting younger.’ ‘What’s our age have to do with anything? My dad still gets on the sauce, and your mum…well, fuck me, no offence. And that bullshit about your body getting less able to manage it, that’s nothing. If anything I feel way more capable of a bender than I used to be.’ ‘I can tell.’ ‘Like an athlete…practice makes perfect and that…’ The girls came back. Kate had a bit of powder ringed around her nostril. She told me to lick it off, which was an escalation I hadn’t expected. The chrome flavour of the coke numbed my gums almost immediately. Which meant it was good quality. Mandy asked us what we were talking about, and Lachie immediately told her. He made me sound like a prissy old conservative. Honestly, the way he told it he wasn’t wrong. Kate rubbed my leg. ‘…and he reckons Costa’s gunna die.’ ‘I’m not saying he’s going to die.’ ‘That’s literally what you said.’ I rubbed my eyes, frustrated as hell. ‘I’m just saying…he might be a bit much, but he hates to be alone. And he hates to sit still. Now he’s being forced to. For six weeks. I don’t know if he can take it.’ Mandy gave me a grim smile. ‘You don’t trust people, Dylan. You’re not afraid that Costa’s going to go nuts. You fully expect  it.’ I gave it up then, but I did ask if the girls wanted to go with me to see Costa tomorrow. I told them it’d mean the world to him. Mandy couldn’t be bothered, but Kate said she might. Lachie said he had breakfast with his parents. 4. The problem Kate had with Costa, she said as I brought her a cup of black coffee, was that the entire universe had to revolve around him. She didn’t blame him. It was just his way. He was like Pantagruel, excessive in everything. Including his presence. She was honestly looking forward to a month and a half’s worth of parties where she could talk to someone without Costa’s thunder booming down the hall, vibrating in our glasses. Think of it, she said, a whole six weeks where we don’t have to debrief the next day about whatever scandalous thing he had said or done, six weeks where the friendship group could just get along without fractures or tensions, six weeks without the garbage bags full of gossip that always seemed to have Costa as their subject. And besides, he was bad to women. He was rude and dismissive when he spoke to her, and she didn’t like to feel that way. She’d made her point. I told her as much. But I was still going to go, and I’d still appreciate her company. She muttered something under her breath and tried to find her bra. 5. ‘Lachlan told me you’re spreading rumours about me. I don’t appreciate that.’ Costa’s disdain was poised before I even entered. ‘You’re a little-goody-two-shoes worry-wart bitch. After everything I’ve done for you, you still talk shit about me behind my back. That’s being a bad friend. I’ve saved your arse on multiple occasions. Remember those chicks from Bathurst? I smoothed that whole thing out. And you say I’ve got a problem. Get thee thy plank outta thy own fuckin eye. You know what I’m talking about. You’re a fucking fiend on the gear.’ I told Kate to sit down in the chair by the window. Her hangover had kicked in. Costa hadn’t yet acknowledged her presence. ‘And anyway, I’m a remarkable human being. I read a whole thing on the Roman emperors when you left yesterday. Does that sound like a drug addict? How could I run a successful business if I were an alcoholic? Are you saying my business isn’t successful?’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘Goddamn right.’ Costa looked out the window, straight past Kate. The white light illuminated his dark skin and eyes. It was the first time in a while I’d seen him well-rested. But as I looked deeper into his expression of rough machismo, I realised how hurt he was. I’d embarrassed him with the one substance he couldn’t stomach. I’d intended to help him, but in doing so I had subjected him to mortality in front of his peers, whose opinions, for better or worse, he desperately cared for. He was a proud man. And if he had nothing else but pride, at least he had that. Lachie was right. Who was I to try and tame a spirit like Costa? I felt a wash of shame for my arrogance. ‘I’m sorry, mate.’ He shrugged. Kate looked at me dolefully. I saw how little she wanted to be here. ‘I just get worried, Cos. I’m worried that things will get worse for us all. Not better.’ ‘They probably will, you fucking idiot.’ ‘You want to play chess?’ ‘Nah, I’ll whoop you too quickly. We should play something for three players.’ Kate’s eyes brightened a bit. ‘I’ve got a pack of cards. We can play Gin Rummy.’ We sat there the entire afternoon, Kate and I, with Costa’s insurmountable, mountain-like presence beginning to eclipse his small room, smoking a joint, staggering out Costa’s and Kate’s dexy’s, sipping on some whiskey I’d found under the bed, laughing and swearing, competing and losing to Costa, who could not, in his indomitable excess, lose. Michael McStay is an Australian writer raised on Bangerang and Wurundjeri country and living in Berlin. He has produced five full-length theatrical plays to critical acclaim. If he isn't reading or writing, he's probably running or talking too much.

My son’s latest venture is hunting down and slaying vampires. From my seat on the porch, I’m watching him fling wooden stakes at a propped-up life-sized cardboard cutout of my sister that has been sitting around collecting dust since we’d used it for her 40th birthday party, the last time I had any contact with her.  My son’s getting better. Just now he nailed her body double directly between the eyes, although technically I think the stake is supposed to pierce the heart.  I take a sip of beer and then a drag from my cigarette. Together, they taste just like life does after a certain age—what I hid from, but suspected all along, came true: my life held no grander purpose, and everyone has been a disappointment. I’m tempted to ask my son how he’s going to be able to tell a vampire apart from a regular person, especially if the vampire is hiding in plain sight, but then I think that given his object of choice for target practice, he’s probably on the right track. Ah, there goes the stake into my sister’s heart. At this rate, my son will soon be ready to take on his own father—no need for a cardboard cutout of him . Eliot S. Ku is a physician who lives in New Mexico with his wife and two children. His writing has appeared in Whiskey Tit, Maudlin House, Carmen et Error, HAD, and Bending Genres, among other places. You can read more at www.eliotsku.com

You stare at the blank page, the cursor cursing.  You type; this is a story about anxiety. A story about the time the wind screamed until the sky grew orange and the clouds choked on ash and where do you go? Where do you go?  You backspace; this is a story about the doctor who gave you someone else’s diagnosis.  You backspace again; This is a story about the hand that bites, words that chew.  You backspace. Again. Again. Again.  This is a story about a flag your family wants you to fly, about the neighbor who wants to know why the light in your garage is blue, about the ice running through a government's veins, about a school on lockdown and how do you breathe? How do you breathe?  This is a story about the cracks that deepen every time the house shakes. This is a story about a cursor that won’t stop blinking. Karen Crawford lives and writes in the City of Angels. Recent work has been included in Best Microfiction Anthology 2025, Gooseberry Pie, Tiny Molecules, Switch and elsewhere. Find her on Bluesky @ karenc.bsky.social  and X @KarenCrawford_

Olivia has seen pictures of the men. Pictures in the big brown book on the glass coffee table at Opa’s house, along with lots of letters that made words underneath them, words she can’t read because she’s only five and in kindergarten and just learning her ABCs. The pictures are of her ancestors,  Mommy says, and Olivia practices saying it, an-ses-ters , a funny word that slithers and squirms on her tongue like a rattlesnake and makes her laugh because that’s a lot of s-es.    Every time they go to Opa’s, Olivia goes right to the coffee table, right to the big brown book to look at the photos of the men who’d come in the olden days, to Phoenix, Arizona, where Olivia lives, from somewhere in Germany, which was very far. They floated across a huge ocean called the Atlantic. Olivia knows these ancestors are kind of like daddies to her, they are related . You have the same blood , Opa explains, but that was silly and she doesn’t understand because she’s alive and they are dead. How long ago the olden days were isn’t clear, but it must have been a very  long time ago, like when the dinosaurs lived, because the pictures are black and white, not in color like the ones Mommy takes with her iPhone.    The men look weird. They have on fancy clothes like she’s seen in church, dark suits with white shirts and high collars buttoned up to their necks, which must have been sweaty because Phoenix is hot like the sun. They wear tightly tied ties (that’s what Mommy calls a tongue twister ) and have long beards like Santa, but they aren’t smiling and they don’t hold bags of presents. Instead, they stand next to wooden wagons or big brick buildings, or they sit straight like kings in fancy old chairs, looking very serious with squinty eyes like they’re mad. Olivia wonders, do the men have wives? What did they eat in the olden days if there was no Trader Joe’s? Why don’t they smile?    You’re obsessed with this book , her Mommy says every time Olivia picks it up. Opa says the book had been printed because her ancestors were very important in Phoenix,  they had started the city, built those big buildings . He smiles with all his teeth and looks over at Mommy whenever Olivia asks him to tell her more. She thinks that might mean he’s proud of her. Thinks that might mean she’s important too, since they share the same blood, although she doesn’t say that out loud because Opa might tell her she’s bragging, which means you think you’re great. That was supposed to be bad. Maybe if she lived in the olden days, she would be very important, because it seems okay for the men. Then it wouldn’t be bragging.   Opa says they’d crossed the ocean and snowy mountains and almost the entire United States to get to Arizona. It took them six months to ride in their wagons because there were no cars in the olden days, which he explains is from now all the way to Olivia’s birthday in June and that is a very long time. The men were brave and smart and strong. You come from hearty stock, Olivia , Opa teases. Olivia isn’t sure what that means, but she thinks it has something to do with cows, and it makes Opa laugh when she says that.    When she’s looking through the big brown book alone, Olivia plays a secret game where she looks for a woman in the book. It’s a fun game because it feels like she’s searching for the golden egg at Easter or something. It’s Mommies who have babies, which is an important thing because the very important men had mommies once (so one must be in the book), but that’s not all that they do because her Mommy takes care of people at the hospital all day, she’s a doctor who helps people get better. It’s a very important job and Olivia thinks someday she might be a doctor, too.    She knows that a woman like Mommy must be there somewhere. She's just hiding. Kelli Short Borges writes from her home in Phoenix, Arizona. Her fiction has appeared in Fractured Lit, Moon City Review, Centaur, and elsewhere. Recently, Kelli's work was chosen for the Wigleaf Top 50 longlist and the 2024 and 2025 editions of Best Microfiction. She’s currently working on her first novel.

My friend has written a poem about a pair of deer—one with antlers, the other without. In the poem, they are in a cemetery filled with green grass and large trees. The antlered deer fixates on the poem’s speaker. He watches her with his whole body. And the antlers too: like antennae reading the air for threat. She is no threat. And, the speaker claims, the deer determines that.  My friend loves deer and wants a tattoo of one on her shoulder.   We are talking about deer and we are also talking about my ex. I say, “We own a house together.” She says she’s sorry for that. I say, “There were years where things were all right.” She nods. I say, “But anyway, a deer is just a deer. A nuisance, a pest really.”  She shakes her head sadly. She says my ex’s name. And then she says, “It wasn’t your fault.” I say, “I lived in Santa Cruz for a while. Maybe that’s why: so many deer there.” I’m thinking about the soft dewy eyes of them, and the velvety antlers too. Their small flicking tails, their precarious stick legs. My friend is also from California, a suburb in the east bay. And now, we’re both in Utah. The mountains here. The snow. The seasons. My ex, meanwhile, is in Albuquerque living with his mother. My friend says, “Really, you’re better off.” I try to remember the poem’s lines, but all I can do is think of the expression deer in the headlights . I say it over and over to myself. Out loud, I say, “Six years of my life.” She says, “We all have different paths to walk.” I hate this. And I wonder if, in this moment, I kind of hate her too. And her cemetery deer. And maybe all deer. Like rats. Like mosquitos. As a child, I hated no animal. I loved them all, deeply. Maybe all children do. When you’re young, you see possibility, not a tired old buck plodding above coffins.  I want to tell all this to my friend. To apologize for hating her and her deer.  She says, “In reality, they ran away from me, you know. The deer.”  She looks at me for a long time. Like I am the deer, and she is the headlights.  I imagine the deer fleeing her and her long looks. And I imagine them moving away from each other too. Each deer for themself. The buck with his impressive rack of antlers slinking off behind a cottonwood tree. And the doe—of course the doe—springing through spring grass between gravestones under the blue blue mountain sky.   Allison Field Bell is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Utah, and she holds an MFA in Creative Writing from New Mexico State University. Her debut poetry collection, ALL THAT BLUE, is forthcoming in 2026. She is also the author of two chapbooks, WITHOUT WOMAN OR BODY (Poetry, Finishing Line Press) and EDGE OF THE SEA (Creative Nonfiction, CutBank Books). Allison's prose appears or is forthcoming in Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, SmokeLong Quarterly, River Teeth, DIAGRAM, The Gettysburg Review, The Adroit Journal, Alaska Quarterly Review, West Branch,  and elsewhere. Find her at allisonfieldbell.com

"Tell me about the proposal." I promise it’s important every Saturday morning,  we walked the neighborhood park. I forgot the names of trees he pointed out because of nature’s  eagerness to make me behold him.  Like in summer, the foliage   (emerald, celadon, jade)  rhymed with his eyes.  The thrumming of cicadas,  brown noise for his clarion tenor to pierce. In fall, he stretched and plucked leaves of grenadine  or ochre, unveiling his height, the span of solid shoulders. Even in winter’s bleakness,  the whiffs of pine conjured  his cologne, woody with  a trace of earthy musk. One day in April, the mist  dampening our jackets,  without warning, he mimed swimming freestyle, arms  pinwheeling through the air.  I stumbled—I missed the sidewalk, struck by how he endeavored to catalyze chaotic delight  in days I wished to regiment. I promise it’s all still important, and I can see why your parents sent you to your gay uncle for advice, but I’m sorry I can’t recall, did you ask who proposed, or how? Supplication   The sky’s lurid vermillion tells of faraway wildfires. The sun, a looming disc of magma,  bears down its hue, like that of a cloying blood orange syrup,  smothering all green  from the forest’s trees.   Let me believe that if everyday I sort my plastics, swap meat for legumes, turn off the tap while brushing my teeth, forego drives on Sunday afternoons,  cultivate my compost bin, insist  on fair trade coffee in reusable mugs, I will soon stop inhaling our planet’s immolation. Stephen K. Kim (he/him) is a queer Korean American writer and educator in New Jersey. He enjoys spending time with his husband and his cat. His poems appear in Ghost City Review, Neologism, Thimble,  and elsewhere. He is a Best of the Net nominee, a student and teacher at the Writers Studio, and a reader for Only Poems . He can be found online @skimperil

Say Phantom, why don’t you play that twinkly opening lick to “Growin’ Up'' on your Korg CX-3 while I tell the good people here at the A-Go-Go this story.  All this happened about six years ago. Or maybe ten years ago. Maybe even twenty. Hell, I don’t remember. Might’ve been yesterday, for all I know. I ain’t the type to stick pins into the cushion of time. What matters is, it happened. And because it happened, I get to stand up here on this stage and talk into this microphone—and you get to hang on to every word I’m about to say. So there we were—me, Phantom, and Miami. We’d just finished playing a field party somewhere off of Poor Farm Road, and we were driving home in my mom’s Oldsmobile Silhouette when all of a sudden we got us a flat tire. We pulled over to the shoulder, popped the trunk and moved all our gear out the back of the van only to discover that we didn’t have a spare. By then, it was pretty dark out there on Poor Farm Road—if you ever been around that way, you know the kind of dark I’m talking about.  Pitch dark.  Total dark.  Can’t-see-the-hand-reaching-for-your-throat-in-the-dark dark.  And of course, there wasn’t nobody else around for miles.  No houses, no cars, no streetlights. Just us, and the trees.  So we’re staring into these deep, dark woods when all of a sudden we see this light shining off in the distance. And we thought to ourselves, Well, maybe somebody lives back there. We ought to go see if we can ask for some help.  Off we went, stumbling through the forest, covering ourselves in mud and twigs and God knows what else. Finally, right as we’re about to collapse from exhaustion, we come upon this little clearing. And there in the middle is this old gypsy lady, just sitting by a campfire.  Now, let me stop right there. You know we’re not supposed to say “gypsy” anymore, right? Oh yeah. I shit you not. Apparently, it’s a racial slur against the Romanian people, or something. The more you know, huh? But beyond that, here’s the real problem with the G-word: it puts a certain picture in your head, and it ain’t a pretty one. Because this lady wasn’t some withered old crone with a wart on her nose and a scarf wrapped around her head. She was a neat, compact little blonde, and well-built too, like a statue. In other words, she looked a lot like Stevie Nicks—she had that same G-word spirit, anyway. And she wasn’t exactly ugly, either. With her tight black jeans and her Stones shirt, she looked like she could’ve been in the crowd at the field party we’d just played. She had one of those faces that you could tell had been very pretty until things started happening to it—things she’d seen, things she’d done, they had all etched themselves across her brow, along her jaw, and around her mouth. She’d spent some time leaning headfirst into some hard-livin’, know what I mean?  Altogether, it wasn’t a bad way of looking.  We walked up real slow and careful, but Stevie Nicks must’ve heard us coming, because before we made it all the way to the campfire, she twisted around on her log and said, “You bums got a flat, huh?”  As you can probably guess, that made us a little nervous. Like, how’d she know we just blew a tire? The road had to be about a mile or two back in the other direction. Plus, the trees were so thick we couldn’t even see the Silhouette no more. We just looked at each other, not sure what to say.  Finally, we all said: “Yeah.” Just like that—all together, at the same time, like three robots about to blow their circuitry. This drew a laugh outta Stevie Nicks. I guess we were expecting a witchy-sounding cackle but it was more like a hiss from deep down in her throat, like the sound a lit cigarette might make, hitting the bottom of a wishing well. It made us realize, for the first time, that she maybe might’ve been a wild creature who actually lived in these woods, and not a human being just hanging out there.  Stevie Nicks got up off her log and took a step toward us. “Who sent you suckers anyway?” she demanded. The fire was throwing crazy shadows across her face, bending all her age lines into crazy zigzags. “What’s wrong, cat got your tongues? Okay, if you ain’t gonna talk, I will. You guys look like a bunch of bums.”  Well, I don’t have to tell you that comment was a little uncalled for. Anybody could tell we were a budget operation—we didn’t exactly look presentable. We’d just stumbled through a dark, muddy forest, for God’s sake. We could’ve done with a shower and a change of clothes and a good night's rest, is what I’m saying. But that was pretty much the story of our lives back then. All of a sudden Stevie Nicks picked up this stick that’d been lying next to her on the ground and waved it at Phantom and BAM! Now he was dressed head-to-toe in this flashy red suit.  She turned to Miami and waved her stick again. BOOM! Now Miami was wearing a shiny white suit.  Both him and Phantom were looking like a million bucks.  Then she turns to me.  Waves her magic stick.  Nothing happens.  She waves it again.  Still nothing.  She looks down at her stick and shrugs. “Sometimes it don’t work like it’s supposed to,” she told me. “Guess you’re just stuck being a bum.” Well, I ain’t about to take that  lying down. So I said, “Hey, Stevie Nicks! You ain’t gettin’ off that easy. C’mon! You owe me one.”  “Okay,” she said, “but I ain’t no mind-reader. Sometimes people gotta say what they want out loud. Go on, don’t be shy. Just tell ol’ Stevie Nicks and I’ll solve all your problems. You want me to fix your flat tire? You want a new transmission? You want your own Papa John’s franchise? You want to be a doctor, or maybe a lawyer? You want to be Emperor of the United States?” She had started buzzing around me like some kind of drunk hummingbird. “Your minivan’s a goner. How about a new car? A BMW? A Mustang? A big old gas-guzzling Hummer? Just say the word and I’ll wave my stick.” “Well,” I told her, “to be honest with you…not to pull any punches…”  I guess I must’ve thought I could speed things along by thinking out loud, but I kept trailing off.  “What I really had in mind was, uh…I think I would really dig…I think I could, uhh…I think I’d like…”  I was buying time, waiting for inspiration to strike. Phantom and Miami were standing off to the side in their shiny new suits, rolling their eyes - kinda like they’re doing right now. Pretty soon, even Stevie Nicks got this impatient look on her face, like all of a sudden there was somewhere important she needed to be. But there must’ve been some rule about granting your own wish, because otherwise she would have sprouted wings and flown off, and left me there talking to myself.  “I think I wanna be…I think I wanna be…I think I wanna be…”  And then it came to me in a flash.  “Hey, Stevie Nicks...I WANNA BE A ROCK N’ ROLL STAR!” Wouldn’t you know that right after I made my wish, that big old forest went silent as a graveyard. The wind died down, and all the leaves and branches got real still. Not a creature was stirring. Even the logs on the fire quit crackling.  Stevie Nicks took a step toward me and held up a long crooked finger that was white as bone.  “You sure that’s what you really want, sonny?” she asked me, waving that bent digit of hers in my face.  I told her, “Lady, we ain’t got all night. Quit wasting both our time and work your magic.” So Stevie Nicks hoisted her stick up over her head, waved it around a couple times and… BOOM! Now here’s the thing: there’s levels to being a rock star. There’s the level where you’re really famous: selling out stadiums, hanging platinum records on the wall, and flying cross-country on a private jet. On that level, everybody knows your name, whether they listen to your product or not.  Then there’s the level where you’re just kinda famous. And within that level, there’s sub-levels.  The internationally-kinda-famous sub-level.  The nationally-kinda-famous sub-level.  But the sub-level where our little rock combo seems to have found itself is micro- regionally-kinda-famous.  This is the sub-level where maybe a few dozen people know us from the flyers we staple to telephone poles around town.  The sub-level where we still gotta hold down day jobs and schedule our jam sessions around childcare and errands and home improvement projects.  You’re probably thinking this is where I tell you that the moral of this story is if you’re ever stumbling through the woods off of Poor Farm Road and you come across a mysterious woman who looks like Stevie Nicks and she offers to grant your most fervid wish, make sure to be as specific as possible.  But not every story needs a moral, an epiphany, or hell, even an ending.  See, my wish came true that night, and it keeps coming true every single day. Look at me. I’m living the dream. So what if I’m not world-renowned? I could call up any dive bar, saloon, or honky tonk between St. Joe and Ste. Genevieve and they’d add our band to their schedule, no questions asked.  Phantom and Miami back there, they’re family men, with extra mouths they gotta feed, and extra responsibilities that need their attention. They got more important things to worry about than trying to squeeze their dad-bods into shiny suits they outgrew years ago. They pick up gigs when they can, and if they can’t, they always let me know when our three-piece needs to turn into a solo act.  But me, I got no wife, no kids, and no obligations other than showing up at downbeat time. I ain’t rich, but I’m sure as hell comfortable. A few years back, I moved into a trailer, right off Poor Farm Road. I love it out there—it’s a laid-back, low-rent way of living. And yeah, maybe my house ain’t much to look at, but long as I got a fridge full of cold beer and a closet full of white undershirts and broken-in blue jeans, that’s all I’ll ever need.  When I get bored, I head to the riverboat out in Boonville. The casino’s set me up with a nice little line of credit, as thanks for our standing engagement on the Bankfull Stage every third Thursday. Last week, I even had me a bit of windfall, so I went out and made a big purchase: I traded in my mom’s old Silhouette for a pre-owned GMC Savana, with forward collision alert, configurable seating, and an 8-cylinder flexible fuel engine.  But the real jackpot is the one I hit that night in the woods.  The famous fella, the rock star, keeps on writing songs, and I keep right on singing ’em. Lately, I’ve had a lot of people tell me that I’m even starting to look like him. I get stopped on the street for pictures, autographs. Maybe playing his tunes all these years rearranged my DNA some way or other.  Do you see a resemblance?  You think he’d hire me to make appearances at boring celebrity events in his place? You think if I put my mind to it, I could fool his wife, his kids, his band mates? Could I skip straight to stealing his identity? How long do you think it’d take before they brought me to justice? You think that even after I stole millions of bucks from him, he’d still like me enough to write a crime ballad about me? I want your honest opinion.  I could pull it off, couldn’t I?  Go ahead. Squeeze in tight around me. Get in a good, long look at this face. See all the magic tricks the years have played on it. Drink me in. I don’t mind the attention. We’re in just the right light. Don't be shy. Stare into me like I’m a dirty mirror. John Waddy Bullion’s writing has appeared in the McNeese Review, X-R-A-Y, the Texas Review, Hunger Mountain, Vol 1. Brooklyn, and elsewhere. His debut collection of short stories “This World Will Never Run Out of Strangers” is forthcoming from Cowboy Jamboree Press in November 2025. He lives in Fort Worth, Texas, with his family. Visit him online at johnwaddybullion.com .

Sunday(in a beautiful clouted world)   She* wore a cute hat for an hour or so, two tops foraged in the bankrupt biscuit tin then siphoned the bestial stench of odd socks. Grading them. Keep or kill.   felt the craving to have seven babies immediately   fed the finagled snake- he said he wanted and then he said he didn’t and so refused to give a name - cryogenic rodents-in-a-bag that thaw just in the nick of time googled the Latin term for fingering a sleeping ass in the morning. It was gone ignored a friend request on facebook that read- imagine me laying on some beach and eating mashed potatoes in this   suicidal by 8. Hat in a tree.     *Sophie     Topless Funeral   Flanked by blue hell and death left on a vacanted barstool altar, with shrimpflicted mad dog in hand and a grin. Oh that hootless grin.   Let us annunciate still life,babygirl.     sprinkles in the Age of Ordinary   you carried your circus with you agitating molecules,juggling hearts and crotches various turning souls on an upright spit.   hair of fairground pink,inked on vanilla they * skirt around you in awe and in orbit but on the brink of revolution you were entombed up the high street,Llantwit Major.   ‘A brilliant colourist’     *on Thursday July 24th 2025 the population on the planet was 8,235,688,200 and only one of them was you   KG is a poet and author based in Wales. The author of the best-selling 'Troubadour Tale" series of books on Bob Dylan, he has now embarked on a poetic journey. Published in Wales, Ireland, England, and now in the US, his first book, "Poetry For The Feeble Minded" was published to critical acclaim. His current WIP, "A Working Class Book Of Psalms," from which these poems are taken, is due to be published in 2026.